This is one of those stories where the headline says it all, really. A chicken shop in Perth is teaching a chicken -- an actual chicken, with feathers and claws and a beak -- to use Twitter.
This is Betty. Betty is a chicken. A chicken learning to use Twitter.
It's a promotion from Perth chicken shop Chicken Treat, who are actually hoping to teach Betty to tweet a real word. They're calling the drive #ChickenTweet and they claim Guinness World Records will grant them a world record if "she can send a five-letter tweet in English within 30 days."
Chicken Treat said in a statement that "she will become the first chicken (and in all likelihood the first animal) to send a real tweet." The shop released a clip titled "Betty training video" but it is unclear how exactly they are "training" her to tweet, aside from forcing her to walk forlornly on a treadmill.
"We taught Betty computer basics using a specially-designed chicken puppet," the video claims. The lessons seemed pretty rudimentary, to be quite honest:
But it actually seems more like they're just waiting around and hoping for Betty to tweet real words. It is literally a chicken version of the "infinite monkey theory" -- that is, "that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare."
We've contacted Chicken Treat for more info, but in the meantime, enjoy some insightful tweet attempts from Betty. Follow along the chicken-related ridiculousness at @ChickenTreat.